28 days into the 31dbbb yeah write challenge and your blog’s well on its way to looking fabulous … but is it getting you noticed … and how can you tell? Visitor rate soaring? Comments coming in thick and fast in response to those exciting new posts in those fabulous formats, including asking lots of questions? Or is your blog all dressed up and going nowhere?

If you want to create your own spot at the center of the world wide web rather than hanging by a fragile thread at the periphery, then check out #28’s ignore-at-your-peril magnificent seven actions for getting your blog noticed …

Develop an SEO strategy

Even if your blog’s just for fun, take a leaf out of the professionals’ online marketing handbook and optimize your blog so that the search engines can find you and highlight your content to people who are searching (a tactic known as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO). There are three easy steps for getting this started:

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Check your blog’s current Google ranking. Just put a “free ranking tool” search into Google and there will be plenty of choices. Choose one, add your blog’s details and the tool should show you where you currently rank for online visibility, 0/10 being zero visibility, 10/10 being the highest, like the Google homepage

Brain-storm all of the words which seem relevant to your blog’s niche, including terms others might use when searching. So if your blog’s all about pet dogs, include terms such as “my dog” and “your dog” to take account of the likelihood of these appearing as search terms “my dog’s got no nose …”

Research those keywords using Google’s nifty Adwords Keyword Tool and Google Trends tools. Putting keywords from your list into these tools will, even at the most basic level, show you (a) whether they are popularly appearing in searches (b) other popular search alternatives. Add these other popular terms to your list

Revise some of your pages to include some of these relevant key words, but use them sensibly and contextually, don’t just ram them in there

Make a plan to use some of your keywords in rotation in subsequent blog posts, including putting them in the titles and adding them to meta-tags and image tags, so that the search engines will easily find your blog

Create an editorial calendar and stick to it so that you are posting regularly. Combining this approach with your SEO strategy is the minimum to do to alert search engines to your presence. However, don’t force your content, grudgingly posting any old content because you feel you ought to won’t engage your readers!

Create cross-links within your blog

Insert links into your posts to link up to your other content—you’ll see lots of fine examples of this across yeah write. Additionally, set up links between your blog posts and your social media platforms.

Strut your stuff

Share post information on your chosen social media platforms or community pages.

Guest post on other blogs

Guest posting on others’ blogs is one of ProBlogger’s most highly recommended strategies, so see if you can branch out this way and create extra back-links to your blog to help you reach a wider readership.

Use multi-media techniques

Varying your post formats to include videos and podcasts is another way of getting yourself noticed online – and give you the potential to “go viral”.

Grow your community

Use social media to a greater potential to help grow your community. As well as posting an update about your latest post, use social media buttons on your blog and even within posts to encourage your visitors to share the fabulous content they’re finding on your blog.

If you employ these seven blog-brandishing heroes as a regular strategy you should see some growth in your readership within a couple of months, so add a visitor counter widget to your blog and check out your stats as you go – and keep an eye on your Google ranking too!

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4 Comments

This has been very helpful! I never really knew where to start with all of this SEO stuff and the tip about keywords I think is most critical. I’m in the budget travel niche and the words I’m using to tag my posts aren’t really doing all they could–dirt cheap travel, cheap vacations, and adventure student travel will serve me much better. Thanks for this excellent advice! I’m off to comb through some of my older articles and choose some more appropriate keywords.